Volume 31, Issue 6

In South Korea, sales by home shopping channels are increasing, and home shopping channels are securing a position as an advertising medium. Because of the economic importance of these channels, research on home shopping channels is necessary to understand their unique rhetorical strategies; these include dialogue, display, and persuasive techniques. Therefore, this study examines the GS and CJ39 Home Shopping Channels in South Korea. To analyze Korean home shopping channels, this study identifies and analyzes various persuasion appeals, persuasive premises, and persuasion strategies and tactics that appear in the advertisement discourse.

The overall aim of this study is to examine how journalistic expert identities are constructed and displayed in the context of intraprofessional journalist-to-journalist interviews on live television news. Previous research has, in detail, explored how journalists orient to the identity of a critical and impartial interrogator, especially in political news interviews. By focusing on journalistic expert identities, this article contributes to a wider perspective on the multiple and changing identities performed in contemporary journalism. The overall argument is that the expert identity is enabled and promoted in collaborative activities on different levels of discourse such as: (i) the media format, (ii) the question–answer based organization of the interaction, (iii) the orientation to liveness, and (iv) how knowledgeability and epistemic stance are constructed and displayed in the actual design of questions and answers. The data consist of interviews from the prime-time news program Aktuellt , broadcast on Swedish public service television in 2008 and 2009.

Metadiscourse, broadly characterized as “discourse about discourse,” manifests itself in many written, spoken, and electronic genres. In line with the reflexive model of metadiscourse, the present article aims at a rich description of metadiscourse in its context. The article examines transition sentences (TS), a relevant discourse category in newspaper texts. The empirical analysis focuses on a metadiscursive device discovered in the Finnish data, the so-called dialogical passive (typically translated as Let's, Let me , or Why don't we ). It is an instance of participant-oriented metadiscourse. Its discourse functions include topic management, source management, management of narrative time and place, initiating an illustration, and evaluative comments. Furthermore, the article explores constraints for metadiscourse. These constraints relate to the style of writing (e.g., genre), the layout and the discourse patterns of texts, professional issues (such as media profiles and writer profiles), and the narrative patterns and rhetoric.

Descriptions of grammars need not be restricted to language. Many attempts at the grammaticalization of nonlinguistic communicative events have been based on the theoretical tenets of systemic functional linguistics; however, in order to account for the affordances of these different semiotic systems, some of the models deviate from the Hallidayan model. With respect to architecture, this article suggests that perhaps it is not the model that needs modification; rather, architecture could be viewed from a different perspective. This article hypothesizes that the pathways that thread throughout spatial texts are analogous to clauses in spoken and written texts. This article develops a fundamental system network which formalizes the choice of pathway that people make as they move through buildings. The system network follows faithfully those that Halliday has developed for language, displaying paradigmatic and syntagmatic agnation as well as a system to structure cycle. I demonstrate that Halliday's model, as is, provides a suitable analytical tool for spatial discourse, that is, meaning beyond the pathway.

In line with Norwegian welfare policies, clients in vocational rehabilitation encounters are responsibilized to take an active part in the planning of measures that will qualify them for suitable work. In situ, among other things, this is actualized by the counselor's open what -question, eliciting the client to propose appropriate actions. The article analyzes two cases where a long-term education is proposed in the answer-slot, which, due to its contingent acceptability, is a very ambiguous interactional enterprise. The analysis demonstrates by means of ethnomethodological conversation analysis how clients might proceed when they deal with the eliciting question. In the first case the client complies with the allocated responsibility of reporting plans/ideas and formulates a proposal easily heard as an answer to the request. The second instance demonstrates a less aligned approach where the client by “proposal-implying tellings” takes steps to transform proposal making into a more open-ended activity. It is argued that the second approach, relying on the counselor's active co-participation, represents a more distributed responsibility, and to the client, a less troublesome way for introducing and discussing a contingent proposal.

Situated in the hybrid context of a Chinese courtroom, this paper sets out to examine how attorneys orient themselves to differences in court debate. Applying the notion of intertextuality as understood within the tradition of Bakhtinian dialogism, the analysis focuses on how attorneys handle otherness, their adversary, and the situated texts (i.e., the legal documents, witness statements, etc.) when they argue. The findings suggest that attorneys may intertextually construct two stances, confrontational monologue and rational dialogue. The implication of this study is two-fold: attorneys are aware of contextual conditioning and, procedurally, attorney advocacy has a potential to influence the final judgment. Data for this study are drawn from three highly iconic infringement cases in China.